New Zealand Writers

PERKINS, Emily

Edged with an adroit downbeat wit and aptitude for episodes that tilt into black-absurdist comedy.

• From The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature
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Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors

PERKINS, Emily (1970– ), won attention when Picador (UK) published her first collection of stories, not her real name and other stories (1996), while she was living in London. It was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Award, won the Best First Book (Fiction) Award and subsequently won the Faber Award in the UK.

Born in Christchurch, she grew up in Auckland and Wellington, worked as a TV actor, and studied acting at the New Zealand Drama School / Te Kura Toi Whakaari and writing at Victoria University. Both are evident in the deft narration and tellingly authentic dialogue of her stories of contemporary weltschmerz. These are mostly sketches in the joyless lives of the young generation of the modern city, conducting relationships with the same sense of anaesthetised necessity with which they work in shops or restaurants. Tama Janowitz’s anodyne New York and Martin Amis’s pleasureless London are discernible in the droll despondency of tone, as are the mannered ellipticalness and emotive reticence of the *Manhire, *Sport or Wellington School of the 1980s–90s. Chad *Taylor and Maria *Wickens are the most comparable New Zealand contemporaries, though Perkins’s dismal tales are edged with an adroit downbeat wit and aptitude for episodes that tilt into black-absurdist comedy.

RR

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In 1999 Victoria University Press published The Picnic Virgin, a selection of writing from the most exciting contemporary writers, chosen by Emily Perkins. It offers some surprising perspectives on the New Zealand experience, seen from both home and elsewhere.

Perkins' novels are Leave Before You Go (Picador, 1998) and The New Girl (Picador, 2001). The New Girl was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Emily Perkins was the 2006 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow. She used the fellowship to work on her latest book, Novel About My Wife ( Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008).